fighting dragons
by tonight a queen
Summary: In her little kingdom on the floor, she liked to play with happily-ever-afters, breaking them apart and re-assembling them, like other children play with blocks.-rose-centric, voldemort wins au


_voldemort wins au, quidditch league, round thirteen_

* * *

**"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."**

_-Neil Gaiman, Coraline_

* * *

Once upon a time there was a little girl with red ringlets sitting under a table with only three legs, trying to see how small of a ball she would have to curl up into before she could disappear completely.

In her little kingdom on the floor, she liked to play with happily-ever-afters, breaking them apart and re-assembling them, like other children play with blocks.

She gave herself a knight on a white horse and imagined up one for her Mummy too, so she would stop crying into her pillow at night, and yelling for Daddy, when she thought Rose couldn't hear.

Sometimes, on really bad days, Rose would give herself a whole new beginning, like the days before that Mummy sometimes told her about, when people could walk around after curfew, read in public, go to Hogwarts, and finally have a dinner that wasn't potatoes. In these stories of Rose's, the magic-man who Mummy whispered about was still alive.

Rose was pretty sure that his name was Harry Potter, and everything would have been okay if he hadn't gone and died.

* * *

In the middle of the night, when the nightmares of the night Daddy was taken to Azkaban, the pounding boots, and screams of "Muggle lover", all grabbed Rose's dreams and overwhelmed them, Mummy would read to her.

They sat with their small stub of a grey candle, and escaped.

* * *

A scrawny little girl with a worn muffler hurried back from the grocery, tripping over her feet in her haste to leave the once-grand, now desolate wizarding alley. The Death Eaters posted on every corner jeered at her. And no matter what song she sang in her head, or how small she tried to make herself, they always knew who she was.

_Mud-blood_. They yelled.

They were the kind of men Mummy would call vulgar, and they stood there picking their teeth and cursing and taunting little girls. One day, Rose snapped and yelled at them.

"I know who I am, thank you very much, so please stop telling me. Maybe your time would be better spent reading one of my Mummy's books." Rose spat out, with as much venom as she could manage.

But then she remembered Mummy's one rule. _Never tell anyone about the books, or they will take me and the library and we can't have that. I love you, Rosy-Pose._ _Knowledge is power and they can't have us being strong, they can't have us read. They're scared of books like ours, especially Muggle books._

The fear clouded her eyes and shook her knees, and then she was lying facedown on the pavement, the tang of blood on her tongue and a broken carton of eggs seeping through her thin coat. Rough laughter pushed its way into her ears, stinging like her skinned knees. Through the pounding in her ears, she could make out one sentence, tolling like a death bell.

_"Girlie, I guess we'll have to come home and take your books, now that we're such good friends."_

* * *

There were too many words inside of Rose and too many people who could hurt her if they made their way out. She didn't speak, instead she silently absorbed everything around her and cared about nothing.

She started to build stories again in her head but these were stories about blood and mothers who were dragged away in the middle of the night, girls who were put into orphanages and called half cracked all their lives because they couldn't speak.

These stories were the stuff of nightmares, her auto-biography. No one would want to read them because who ever heard of a good story that didn't end in happily-ever-after? (These didn't.)

* * *

_"Muggle-born mother, father a good-for-nothing, died in Azkaban, came here a year ago and hasn't spoken a word since. I know she has pretty hair, but there are other ones that you would rather adopt, come over here."_

_"Oh, Rose? She's the queer one here, seems to think that she's too good to speak to us."_

_"Roo-oose, won't you come talk with us? Why don't you tell us a story, just like the book you keep under your bed? You know we can kill you for that?"_

* * *

Rose thought that no one would care about the fairy-tales that a girl like her had to tell. After a while, though, she couldn't hold them in any longer.

So she sat next to a tottering cot, with a circle of rejected children in a dingy orphanage and shocked everyone by speaking.

She told them a story.

It was a story about a girl who was a lot like them, without parents or shoes, trying to clean her days away. It had all the elements that good stories usually contain- a villain and a princess, slippers and a ball, a prince and a pumpkin and a fairy-godmother. A happy-ever-after and a once-upon-a-time.

The children were silent, spell-bound by a magic they had never heard before. A tiny boy broke the silence.

"Rose, are you sure that was really a story? 'Cos I always heard that stories were evil and would rot my head but that- that,"

He couldn't finish his thought but another child did for him. "That was perfect."

Rose tried to imagine what her Mummy would have answered, talking to her in the dead of night under the kitchen table. Then Rose took a deep breath and explained.

"They don't want us to hear the stories because all they can see is the villain. They don't like us hearing about it 'cos we're not supped to think, and then we might realize how bad they are to us. But they're wrong, really. The story isn't just there to show that there are bad guys. We know that they're there, we just need the stories to tell us that one day they'll go away again."

* * *

Once upon a time there was a little girl who wanted a happily ever after, just like everyone else does.

But she ruined her life and her mother died and she was sent far from home and her happy-ever-after couldn't have seemed farther away.

* * *

Once upon a time, she found her voice again and realized something important. Happy endings don't just fall out of trees and make everything better.

People build happy-ever-afters.

The same regular people who fight dragons in fairy tales.


End file.
